Nature and Shadows in the Caribbean: Queer Subjectivity and Identity in Helen Klonaris’s “Ghost Children” and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night

Abstract

This paper argues that the Greek-Bahamian writer, Helen Klonaris, and Trinidadian-born novelist, Shani Mootoo, pay obeisance to those systemically marginalised peoples in the Caribbean whose notions of self continue to be damaged by forms of imperialist attitudes which condemn queer and non-heteronormative desire as monstrous and strange. The authors offer an alternative discourse to etch out critical insights into the complicated lives and subjectivities of Caribbean communities, and in so doing, have recuperated tropical nature as a recourse to therapeutic interventions and as a space that protects the vulnerable from lethal neocolonial forces, which aim to disfigure the mind and body. This work, therefore, presents the task of locating a language in which the tacit understanding of deviant and queer encounters, and pleasures, can be made knowable and available to epistemic inquiry.

Keywords

• tropical nature
• queer ecology
• Caribbean spectrality